A Nervous Wreck
by A Green Being
Summary: What was Christie thinking, Jim's first day back to work, before she sniped at him in the Pilot?


**A Nervous Wreck**

I wasn't ready for Jim to come home yet.

I'd been planning this night for weeks, so when it finally came time, I could just do it without thinking. I'd made dinner, more courses than Jim and I could eat in a week, but plenty that we could savor and relax all evening. Champagne was chilling in the refrigerator, the wine already open and waiting to be poured. The stove was simmering. The candles were lit, the table set. I'd even bought flowers: cala lilies. All that was left was for me to change into something inviting, soft, and comfortable. And to dab a little cologne behind my ears for effect.

Everything was ready except for me. I wasn't worried about physically looking my best. It was the mental preparation I hadn't completed. I hadn't managed to assuage my worry over Jim's first day back to work. I'd known it was coming for almost a year, yet it felt like it had snuck up on me.

When it came to Jim, I had plenty to worry about. Things hadn't been so great between us for years, but we'd pushed all that aside. Jim put all his energy into getting back to work… which was the one thing I despised most. His job. His focus on his job. The people he met on his job. His job, those people, they were all more important than I was. There I was, always at home, waiting to see if Jim would bother to come home at night.

It used to be, when we were first married, that I could barely get him out of the house.

Things changed. There's not a happily ever after. I guess I'd been naïve. I'd actually expected things to go well when we married. A few fights here and there, but nothing major. It made me wonder if Jim had the same naiveté I was well endowed with, or if he'd known somehow, using all his greatest detecting skills, that he and I weren't the types to settle down and just be happy together.

I still wasn't sure what had ever actually happened between us. Just one day, Jim changed. His perception of me changed. He'd said he would always cherish me, that I was perfect for him… Then he looked at me one day, and I knew it was over. He'd met someone and maybe she was better than me in some way or other, and he looked at me and I knew he was comparing me to her, whoever she was.

I know now that her name was Anne, and I was absolutely right about everything I'd suspected. Jim… "dabbled," as one of the women I worked with likes to put it. Her husband dabbled a lot, and they divorced and now she's never been happier. But I didn't want a divorce. I just wanted the hurt to go away and I wanted to know nothing. Could I really have been happy in ignorance? I'd actually spent time dreaming about how happy I could have been—sometimes it made me sick to think of me stupidly going about my day; other times I was convinced that was the only way to live.

The affair wasn't important by this point. It was almost water under the bridge. Jim and I worked it out. He apologized… I said I forgave him. I didn't need to be thinking about Anne, not when there were more important things.

Like watching him leave that morning, watching him walk out the door with a guide dog leading him. My hands had started shaking. It had been a year and Jim and I had finally gotten our life back together through endless sessions of rehab and lectures about not moving anything in the apartment and garnering a healthy dose of dreams about how everything would be fine. He'd spent a year fighting, not for his life, but for his job. And that morning, the look on his face as I smoothed out his coat, told me he didn't need me anymore. He'd leaned on me and gotten what he wanted and now he was headed back to work and he was fine.

I froze in the living room. Jim's face took up the big screen TV. I'd been half-waiting, half-dreading seeing more news interviews. I could see him there like a voyeur, seeing the scene he'd deprived me of early that morning by declining my offer of a ride. And now I felt I knew too much, seeing him surrounded by newsmen and cameramen. "I couldn't be happier," he said with a grin.

I felt cold and rubbed the sleeve of my shirt as if that could make things better.

I used to like his job. He was the tough cop. My girlfriends used to tease me about the gun and the all-knowing detective.

But once someone gets shot, how do you reconcile that? How could Jim, when he was the one there, when he was the one who was shot, when it was him going through rehab and trying to bounce back and just walk across the apartment on his own, how could he go back to the job that had nearly killed him? Watching him walk out the door that morning, I couldn't understand. What had I done? Why had I encouraged him to go back? He'd been shot once already and I'd nearly lost him and spent hours crying in a hospital waiting room before they let me see him with a bandage wrapped around his temple. And hours more crying in his hospital room waiting for him to wake up. And hours spent crying at home where he wouldn't know I was crying because I had to be strong around him. And watching him struggle and not let me help him for a year.

And watching him walk out the door to go back to that job that had caused all that. I didn't want to let him go, but there's no reasoning with Jim when he sets his mind to something. Everything else is extraneous. I'm extraneous.

Hank the Guide Dog Extraordinaire wasn't having any of those feelings, leading my husband out the door just because he'd been ordered to. What was Hank thinking? He couldn't know, having been trained to keep Jim safe, that his job now was to take him back to the place Jim was least safe. That dog, Jim's key to independence, was also one of the variables I worried about most. Hank didn't know what he was doing, and Jim… I didn't want him to overestimate his own confidence.

Hank, the mayor, the police, they were all my enemies. They were all there for Jim, helping him get his job back, pushing him along to see if he could do it. They didn't know what he was capable of. They hadn't been with him a year, watching him get frustrated and angry the first time he couldn't do something, and then withdrawing even further when he became confident enough he didn't need a constant companion. I was proud of Jim and everything he'd accomplished, but I knew his limitations, too. I knew his temper. I knew his recklessness. How could all these people be encouraging him when they didn't know Jim?

All I could keep thinking was that it wasn't going to work out. Maybe he'd be safe; I was sure they wouldn't let him get hurt, not his first day back. But all I could see when I thought about Jim was him walking through the door, having failed.

The only thing that had helped him move on after the bank robbery was the idea that he could get back to work and be a detective just like before, no matter what. And in between those bursts of enthusiasm for getting back, in between all the hard work, I was the only one who'd seen him depressed or seen him feel sorry for himself. I'd been there for him because there was nothing else I could do. This job was what he wanted most in the world, and I couldn't take that away from him, not when he'd lost so much else.

But if it turned out he couldn't do it…

That scared me as much as the thought of him getting hurt again. What if Jim failed? He kept saying he could do everything he could before, except drive. But what if that wasn't true? How would he handle that? Then what would he do? Jim couldn't just sit around the house.

So while I prayed that he would be able to do his job, without getting hurt, and I prayed he wouldn't fail, I also prayed that he'd come home, tell me he'd proved he could do it, but that he'd agreed to stay in the squad, at a desk, and just help out that way. I just prayed he'd come home.

He'd looked relaxed this morning before he left, but I could see the tension in his face when the news crew was interviewing him. Despite the smile… I knew Jim and I knew the moment I saw him on TV that he'd been having the same doubts I had that morning. I just wished he would have shared them with me. He never talked to me. And why not? I'd always been under the impression that married people helped each other, and offered comfort and support. Despite my misgivings about him going back to work, I'd been there for Jim while he plotted and schemed how best to go about getting back. So why couldn't he just open up this morning and tell me he was worried, too?

I felt sick. The apartment was all set, the candles burning, the food cooking, the TV volume low so it wouldn't be a distraction. All I wanted was five more minutes to remind myself how to breathe and figure out how to smile.

Jim was bound to notice the carefully planned celebration when he walked in the door. First he'd notice the food. Three kinds of desert. He'd smell that first, then hear the vegetables simmering on the stove. I'd change my clothes so when he kissed me he'd know it was a special occasion. Then I'd have him sit at the table while I served dinner and he'd notice the candles. He always noticed little things like that, like the lingering smell of sulfur from a match.

I wouldn't tell him I'd been worried, not if everything went okay, even though I hoped he wasn't working a case yet. If the lieutenant he'd been assigned to had any intelligence, he'd wait a couple days for Jim to get his feet wet. Jim needed to learn his way around the squad and the people before they assigned him anything that would take him out and make him dependent on his partner. Jim had opened up, just a little, a week ago, to let me know he was worried about his new partner, though that had been the end of the discussion, no matter what else I asked. Just from knowing Jim, I knew he was worried about seeming dependent, and hoping the new guy would be open to describing the scene, and I also knew Jim had a hard time placing his trust in anyone anymore.

I stood staring at the clothes in my closet. Plenty to wear, but nothing seemed right. It was sometimes hard to dress for Jim now. Did I wear something that swished so he could hear me move, or did I wear something with a pattern he could feel, or something soft and inviting? No matter what my misgivings were, this was a special occasion.

I heard the front door open, then a second of silence. Jim didn't say anything for once and I felt my stomach lurch as I stared at my open closet. Usually when he came home he called me, wanting to know where I was at all times.

"Jim?" I called, keeping my voice light, even as every possible scenario ran through my head, all the things I'd worried would go wrong his first day. I took a deep breath, but it shook when I let it out.

It was too late to dress, but it didn't matter. Jeans and t-shirt could say just what I wanted them to, that I was glad he was home and ready to spend a comfortable evening with him. I hurried out to find him already grabbing a beer from the refrigerator. I breathed in, smelling casserole and fresh fruit and melted butter, and I smiled.

"Yeah?" he called too loudly, not having heard me come in.

"How was your day?" I hurried forward. Once he knew where I was, he always liked physical reassurance that I was there. I'd grown used to that, whenever one of us came home, his need to touch me.

"It was good. I was busy." He seemed okay, happy even. He turned and I readied myself, resisting the urge to fling myself at him and say how glad I was to see him. He was okay and I finally stopped shaking. I could feel a real smile on my face for the first time that day.

Jim knelt down, Tupperware in hand, calling the dog, like he hadn't noticed a thing. I remembered days like this, before, when Jim had just stopped noticing everything, maybe a year after we were married. All the little things that he had spent so much energy this past year taking notice of again, they didn't matter again. Everything was fine, like it had been right before the shooting. I swallowed a lump and busied myself so I wouldn't have to look at him.

Everything was back to normal and I felt numb. But I wouldn't cry, I wouldn't get angry. "Are you working a case?" I asked rotely.


End file.
